The University of Lethbridge International Genetically-Engineered Machine team — or iGEM team — is working to counteract a disease that affects canola crops.
“It’s really a challenge for our industry to come up with new methods to try getting ahead of this pathogen,” said Clinton Jurke, the agronomy director with Canola Council of Canada.
That pathogen is known as Clubroot, a costly soil-borne disease that affects the root and limits yields.
According to Jurke, the pathogen that was first found in central Alberta in 2003, has spread across the country.
Even with solutions like genetically modified Clubroot-resistant crops, it still finds a way to infect canola, racking up costs for farmers.
“If a farmer wanted to send some soil samples in that you think might have clubroot in that soil, it’s going to cost $100 for each of those samples that are submitted,” said Jurke.
The ULethbridge iGEM team, called Club^2, is hoping to help cut those costs with a rapid detection kit.
“It would provide a very fast result within a matter of hours to by the end of the day to the farmers … if that particular soil is infected or not,” said Dr. Vineet Rathod, University of Lethbridge instructor and primary investigator.
The team of 22 lab members led by Dr. Rathod is currently using computer-engineered proteins.
“Our next step would be to use these infected soil and look and determine the specificity and sensitivity of our system if it can recognize infected soils and infected roots,” said Rathod.
By next year, the lab hopes to create a test strip similar to a COVID-19 rapid test that farmers can use in the field.
“If you do get two of the green signals, that means that is infected with clubroot,” explained Rathod.
“Knowing the presence or absence of the pathogen in a field is very important to any farmer that wants to grow canola,” said Jurke.
Their preliminary results are promising enough to earn the team a spot at next month’s iGEM Grand Jamboree In Paris, France. It’s a world expo of synthetic biology, where the team will compete against others from around the world.
The Club^2 team looks to represent Lethbridge and hopefully bring home a gold medal.
In the future, it hopes to develop a spray using the engineered chimeric proteins to mitigate the spread of Clubroot.